Archive for the ‘reading’ Category

Although A reads a lot on his own, he rarely reads to me. It was a fight each time and I decided to hold off for a while. A friend mentioned that her child was getting into the A to Z Mysteries by Ron Roy. I got the first one from the library and deemed it our new reader. I was met with resistance at first but today he read willingly 🙂 and well! 🙂 I am very happy! I worry that he is not learning new words when he is reading by himself ; maybe he just skips around. But I think my fear is unfounded. I am going to finish this book with him and see if he wants to continue the series.

My dad and brother came over to work on our new addition today. It is wonderful that Alex is around to see and help with the progress they make. They are using all kinds of skills and he gets a chance to bond with family. He hung out with them most of the morning, only taking a break to eat lunch, finish his chores, and do a few “schooly” things.

In the afternoon, we had a minor snafu. Alex really wanted to play Star Wars adn unfortunately his friend was not able to meet up with us at the park. Cue the meltdown. I somehow convinced him to go anyway, and he had a good time. While the mosquitoes dined on me, the boys ran around for a couple hours and even made a few friends. “Recess” at its best.

I have been working on having A read to me every day. Sometimes we read out of a basal reader and sometimes it is real life stuff. Today was the latter. He helped me with preparing dinner by cutting the vegetables (with a “real” knife!) and reading the recipe to me. I am finding that recipes and shopping lists are great platforms for discussing grammar and phonics skills. We had some really tricky words tonight! Ian helped as well with washing the vegetables. What he lacks in skill, he makes up for with his passionate enthusiasm(read: the kitchen was completely flooded but he was happy :-)). Dinner, Veggie Pot Pie, was delicious although my husband thinks it is blasphemy to put anything but apples in a pie crust.

I think I am going to indulge myself with some mindless TV before hitting the sack.